Peter O’Toole: Oft-nominated actor retires

LOS ANGELES — Peter O'Toole is retiring from show business, saying he no longer has the heart for it and that it’s time to “chuck in the sponge.”

Mr. O’Toole, who turns 80 on Aug. 2, said in a statement Tuesday that his career on stage and screen fulfilled him emotionally and financially, bringing “me together with fine people, good companions with whom I’ve shared the inevitable lot of all actors: flops and hits.”

“However, it’s my belief that one should decide for oneself when it is time to end one’s stay,” he said. “So I bid the profession a dry-eyed and profoundly grateful farewell.”

In retirement, Mr. O'Toole said, he will focus on the third volume of his memoirs.

An eight-time Academy Award nominee who never won Hollywood’s top acting honor, Mr. O'Toole shot to screen stardom 50 years ago in the title role of “Lawrence of Arabia,” which earned seven Oscars, including best picture and director for David Lean.

Peter O’Toole played a lecherous old actor consigned to roles as feeble-minded ... more >

Mr. O'Toole’s grand performance as British adventurer T.E. Lawrence brought him his first best-actor nomination, but set him on an unenviable path of Oscar futility. His eight losses without a win is a record among actors.

In the latter film, Mr. O'Toole played a dissolute actor preoccupied with drink and debauchery, seemingly a tailor-made role for a star known in his early years for epic carousing with such fellow partiers as Richard Burton, Richard Harris and Peter Finch.

Mr. O'Toole went into acting after serving in the Royal Navy, studying at London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. His early stage successes included the lead in “Hamlet” and Shylock in “The Merchant of Venice.”

He was among a wily new breed of young British stage actors who soon would rise to Hollywood stardom.

“There was a group of us working-class actors, Peter O'Toole, Albert Finney, everybody, and we changed the way things were,” Michael Caine said last weekend in an interview for his latest film, “The Dark Knight Rises.”

Mr. Caine recalled being Mr. O'Toole’s understudy in playwright Willis Hall’s “The Long and the Short and the Tall,” which opened in London in 1959.

“He did an incredible performance and he got ‘Lawrence of Arabia,’ and then I took it on tour,” said Mr. Caine, a two-time Oscar winner.

In 2003, at age 70, Mr. O'Toole received an honorary Oscar, often given as a consolation prize for acclaimed actors and filmmakers who never managed to win Hollywood’s top award.

The honorary Oscar came 20 years after his seventh nomination, for “My Favorite Year.” By then it seemed a safe bet that Mr. O'Toole’s prospects for another nomination were slim. He still was working regularly, but in smaller roles unlikely to earn awards attention.